From dead ends to LA dreaming

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The suburbs have been a source of subject matter in Australia
for certain painters for many years. But sometimes a theme can lead
to a dead-end.

Darren Wardle cultivated his paintings of Melbourne's northern
and outer suburbs to such a point of technical refinement that the
ideas lost their emphasis. So he applied for and received a
three-month residency in the Australia Council's Los Angeles studio
this year. The trashy urban scapes of the Californian city had
affected his first change in artistic direction 15 years earlier,
when he saw a retrospective of the art of Ed Ruscha there.

"His work was preplanned and cold, which was the opposite of
what I was doing then," Wardle says.

Wardle thought little of it at the time, but a year later
Ruscha's graphic vernacular from the suburban environment and
shopping malls crept into his mind.

"His work at that time was really postmodern," Wardle says. "He
was one of the precursors of artists using text in a
quasi-advertising style. He influenced people like Barbara
Kruger."

Inspired by Ruscha, Wardle freed up his expression by
experimenting with various mediums.

"I had been using a lot of paint and slopping it on," he says.
"I had to change the process so it was less direct, more convoluted
or mediated. I started using a lot more photography of landscapes
and photocopies."

The suburban images he had seen in Los Angeles planted a seed
and he looked to his own backyard for subject matter. The
semi-rural housing and expansion in some outer suburbs appealed to
him, the places that hadn't developed a suburban sentimentality
such as Templestowe, with its "fake Graceland set-ups", where he
grew up.

"I started looking at the discrepancy between this Australian
frontier bush myth and the tradition of the Australian landscape
and the prominence that it held in the culture, and the reality of
our lives as one of the most suburbanised nations on earth,"
Wardle, 35, says.

He rearranged information and images. For a short while he
headed out into the night and stole real estate signs. In the
studio he chopped them up with an angle grinder and made collages.
He then stencilled imagery over the top and reassembled them as
grids to make the image more formal.

"It was about a reappropriation of information. I was also
chopping up cheap landscape prints by, say, Constable, that you
would find in a lot of suburban homes, that were in my home."

Wardle says he was finding his way, moving into something more
idiosyncratic, rather than the influences he had been working with
as an art student.

"It was an interesting transitional time which went for about
three years in the mid-'90s; the techniques, subject matter, the
whole process."

In the past few years, he has seen suburban ideas sprouting in
inner-city redevelopment and inner-city ideas being redeployed in
the suburbs.

This year, in a sense, he has come full circle, back to the
glossy modernism of the American city that helped inspire his
suburban reinvention in 1991. He has been to Los Angeles twice
since and did a few works based on photographs from the trips. But
this was the first time he could really focus on the sprawling
suburbs, including the Hollywood Hills and Anaheim.

The Australia Council studio is in an arts complex that is part
of a "quasi-hippie, beachside arts community" in Santa Monica. The
converted factory has double-height ceilings with huge walls to
work on and mezzanine living conditions. Wardle toured the streets
and cul de sacs taking hundreds of digital photographs, often
loosely snapping with one hand as he drove with the other.

In the studio, armed with data, overhead projectors and a
laptop, he imported imagery and stitched them together loosely with
Photoshop.

"I pump up colour intensities and light effects and various
combinations of filters, and the detail becomes blown out," he
says. "And then it's a labour-intensive painting process that's
fairly traditional using acrylic and oil paint."

The detail is removed to enhance the form and structure. His LA
cityscapes are hallucinatory and exaggerated. The luminous colours
combine with the slick design elements to bring a video-game
quality to some of his paintings.

"It's part of the new world," he says. "As far as the West is
concerned, digital has recalibrated our sensibilities in dramatic
ways. The world is becoming so overloaded, hence the seamless,
slinky, artificial colours.

"I'm not trying to get across an idea of a better time. There is
no sentimentality; it's the time that I know. We are so dependent
on screens and optic technologies now, which are through our
suburban and urban areas, like security cameras. I was trying to
represent environments that had come from a slightly paranoid
idea."
Despite his reliance on computer programs and digital images to
help create his paintings, Wardle still sees himself strictly as a
painter.

"If I was just to leave things in a digital state, as a digital
print, it would completely change the content and the meaning and
the reception of the work," he says, "Painting has a history; it
still has the evolutionary jump on a lot of new media because of
its history.

"Back in the Renaissance, those guys were involved in the camera
obscura, new ideas on perspective, philosophies, mathematics.
Painting has always been hooked into cultural developments, whether
it be in science, philosophy or literature, architecture. It's no
surprise that painters are interested in the technology of the
digital age."